The Man Who Loved Schooners

byLou Boudreau

After a German submarine sinks the merchant barkentine Angelus, her ten crew are left to face the cold and merciless north Atlantic in a small open lifeboat without food or water. Over the next ten horrifying days, 24-year-old Walter Boudreau witnesses the death of all but one of his shipmates. Miraculously, Boudreau survives. Just as incredible, this agonizing introduction to life before the mast does nothing to cool his passion for sailing. Over the next four decades, Captain Boudreau’s love affair with the sea aboard his various classic schooners takes him through nautical adventures both thrilling and extraordinary. This book plots an exciting voyage from a shipwreck in the far north and the dramatic rescue of a stranded U.S. naval vessel, to an eerie encounter with a tiger shark. We witness the terror of confronting a 65-foot rogue wave, a fight with drug pirates in the Bahamas, and the onslaught of a vicious hurricane. Journeying from Canada’s East Coast to the Caribbean islands, across the raging Atlantic and, finally, home to Canada, the trials and tribulations of a life at sea – including the tragic loss of several of Boudreau’s beloved schooners – are tempered by the wonderful adventures of life under sail.

In this book, Walter Boudreau’s son, Robert Louis (Lou) Boudreau has chronicled the stories his father passed on to him. As Lou Boudreau writes, “Although I have put pen to paper, it is my father who speaks in his own voice.”